Ad-hoc networks are increasingly popular due to their minimum dependence on infrastructure. Ad-hoc networks may be seen as a means for extending the range of existing networks, where mobile nodes attached to the infrastructure network are used as access points by other nodes.
This usage is very useful for devices that are constrained by their access network limitations. By forming a personal area network (“PAN”) in an ad-hoc manner, devices can still access the network using low power short range connectivity. This allows devices such as MP3 players or cameras to direct their power resources to their specific features for processing music or video captures, rather than channel that power towards long range radio transmission. The PAN allows peripheral devices to achieve their characteristic features while providing the peripheral devices connectivity to the wide area network through other nodes in the network.
A cellular network is a popular wide area access network technology. The cellular network provides voice and data access to its subscribers, and the number of data users has been increasing much more rapidly than voice users in the 3G version of cellular systems. Although the cellular system is a popular access technology, it currently limits its access to cellular access technologies (for example, WCDMA or cdma2000 standards) and have recently included WLAN as part of the infrastructure. Other upcoming WANs include WiFi and WiMAX technologies.
Currently, 3GPP is also dealing with personal area networks, concentrating on single user PANs where all devices in a PAN belong to a single user.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to allow devices with all access network interfaces (specifically, short range wireless networks) to be able to access the WAN securely through any available mobile device, thus extending the PAN to a multi-user scenario.
Devices with an existing relationship and direct access to the WAN will hereinafter be referred to as user equipment (“UE”) and devices without an existing relationship or a direct access interface to the WAN will be hereinafter referred to as terminal equipment (“TE”).
US Patent Application No. 2005/0197098 A1, entitled “Method and apparatus to provide charging for ad-hoc service provisioning between trusted parties and between untrusted parties,” filed Sep. 8, 2005, by Dirk Trossen, describes a similar scenario of an originating device using a bridging device to connect with a WAN, in the process negotiating and billing the originating device. The method depends on the trusted code to be present on both these devices thus extending the system to communication between both trusted and untrusted parties.
The above reference mentions that the trusted code in TE may be installed either by download over the air through UE, or the trusted code may be pre-loaded and integrated with software on the device. The former method of downloading using UE raises security concerns as the technique assumes the involved parties may trust each other, which might not be true. Some of the concerns are the UE manipulating the trusted code or making copies of the trusted code which may be used later to fake TE access. The latter method of pre-loading and integrating every device with the trusted code raises more issues with additional standardization of such code into all generic devices, or change of owner, or change of service provider, or user requirements of access control of these devices into the network. The invention solves this problem by re-using an existing relationship between the user and the network. The user establishes a trust between his TE and the network by registering his TE, and defining limitations of its use, thus increasing the trust in the system when the TE accesses the network through untrusted UE.
The next problem can be seen by the UE charging the TE. This would provide an inflexible method of event monitoring and could practically support only a few charging schemes such as byte-counting. Any more sophistication in charging scheme would require the UE charging software to know more about the content of the data. Therefore, content-based charging schemes will be very difficult to support in this method.
The present invention aims to solve this problem by simply using UE as a proxy that relays messages between TE and the network, and hence allows the charging to be done at the network.
The present invention aims to provide solutions for the details that the service provider may have about TE, and how the trusted code is transferred based on an existing subscriber relationship.